Uber used a secret spyware program, codenamed Surfcam, to steal drivers from an Australian competitor with the aim of putting that company out of business. The startup was backed by high-profile investors including billionaire James Packer and hedge fund manager Alex Turnbull. ABC News reports: GoCatch was a major competitor to Uber when the U.S. company launched in Australia in 2012. At the time, both companies were offering a new way to book taxis and hire cars using a smartphone app. Surfcam was developed in Uber Australia's head office in Sydney in 2015. A former senior Uber employee has told Four Corners that the idea behind the use of the Surfcam spyware was to starve GoCatch of drivers.

"Surfcam when used in Australia was able to put fledgling Australian competitors onto the ropes," the former employee with direct knowledge of the program said on the condition of anonymity. "Surfcam allowed Uber Australia to see in real time all of the competitor cars online and to scrape data such as the driver's name, car registration, and so on." It allowed Uber to directly approach the GoCatch drivers and lure them to work for Uber. "GoCatch would lose customers due to poaching of its drivers draining their supply. With fewer and fewer drivers, GoCatch would eventually fold," the former Uber employee said. GoCatch's co-founder and chief executive, Andrew Campbell, said Uber's tactics damaged the company. He said: "The fact that Uber used hacking technologies to steal our data and our drivers is appalling. It had a massive impact on our business. It sets a really dangerous precedent for the Australian economy and Australian businesses as well. It tells every multinational company to come to Australia and follow the same practice. As an Australian small business, a technology start-up business based in Australia that's improving efficiency and service levels in the taxi industry, to have a company come to Australia and get away with that type of behavior is ... it's disgusting."

A senior Uber source has confirmed the existence of Surfcam, saying it was developed by a staff member in the Sydney head office who modified off-the-shelf data scraping software. "They said the Sydney employee did it under his own authority, and that once Uber discovered this, they requested he stop," the report says.

The world's largest scientific publisher, Elsevier, left a server open to the public internet, exposing user email addresses and passwords. "The impacted users include people from universities and educational institutions from across the world," reports Motherboard. "It's not entirely clear how long the server was exposed or how many accounts were impacted, but it provided a rolling list of passwords as well as password reset links when a user requested to change their login credentials." From the report: "Most users are .edu [educational institute] accounts, either students or teachers," Mossab Hussein, chief security officer at cybersecurity company SpiderSilk who found the issue, told Motherboard in an online chat. "They could be using the same password for their emails, iCloud, etc." Motherboard verified the data exposure by asking Hussein to reset his own password to a specific phrase provided by Motherboard before hand. A few minutes later, the plain text password appeared on the exposed server. Elsevier secured the server after Motherboard approached the company for comment. Hussein also provided Elsevier with details of the security issue.

An Elsevier spokesperson told Motherboard in an emailed statement that "The issue has been remedied. We are still investigating how this happened, but it appears that a server was misconfigured due to human error. We have no indication that any data on the server has been misused. As a precautionary measure, we will also be informing our data protection authority, providing notice to individuals and taking appropriate steps to reset accounts."

Sophisticated AI generally isn't an option for homebrew devices when the mini computers can rarely handle much more than the basics. NVIDIA thinks it can do better -- it's unveiling an entry-level AI computer, the Jetson Nano, that's aimed at "developers, makers and enthusiasts." From a report: NVIDIA claims that the Nano's 128-core Maxwell-based GPU and quad-core ARM A57 processor can deliver 472 gigaflops of processing power for neural networks, high-res sensors and other robotics features while still consuming a miserly 5W. On the surface, at least, it could hit the sweet spot if you're looking to build your own robot or smart speaker. The kit can run Linux out of the box, and supports a raft of AI frameworks (including, of course, NVIDIA's own). It comes equipped with 4GB of RAM, gigabit Ethernet and the I/O you'd need for cameras and other attachments.

Google researcher James Forshaw discovered a new class of vulnerability in Windows before any bug had actually been exploited. The involved parts of the flaw "showed that there were all the basic elements to create a significant elevation of privilege attack, enabling any user program to open any file on the system, regardless of whether the user should have permission to do so," reports Ars Technica. Thankfully, Microsoft said that the flaw was never actually exposed in any public versions of Windows, but said that it will ensure future releases of Windows will not feature this class of elevation of privilege. Peter Bright explains in detail how the flaw works. Here's an excerpt from his report: The basic rule is simple enough: when a request to open a file is being made from user mode, the system should check that the user running the application that's trying to open the file has permission to access the file. The system does this by examining the file's access control list (ACL) and comparing it to the user's user ID and group memberships. However, if the request is being made from kernel mode, the permissions checks should be skipped. That's because the kernel in general needs free and unfettered access to every file. As well as this security check, there's a second distinction made: calls from user mode require strict parameter validation to ensure that any memory addresses being passed in to the function represent user memory rather than kernel memory. Calls from kernel mode don't need that same strict validation, since they're allowed to use kernel memory addresses.

Accordingly, the kernel API used for opening files in NT's I/O Manager component looks to see if the caller is calling from user mode or kernel mode. Then the API passes this information on to the next layer of the system: the Object Manager, which examines the file name and figures out whether it corresponds to a local filesystem, a network filesystem, or somewhere else. The Object manager then calls back in to the I/O Manager, directing the file-open request to the specific driver that can handle it. Throughout this, the indication of the original source of the request -- kernel or user mode -- is preserved and passed around. If the call comes from user mode, each component should perform strict validation of parameters and a full access check; if it comes from kernel mode, these should be skipped. Unfortunately, this basic rule isn't enough to handle every situation. For various reasons, Windows allows exceptions to the basic user-mode/kernel-mode split. Both kinds of exceptions are allowed: kernel code can force drivers to perform a permissions check even if the attempt to open the file originated from kernel mode, and contrarily, kernel code can tell drivers to skip the parameter check even if the attempt to open the file appeared to originate from user mode. This behavior is controlled through additional parameters passed among the various kernel functions and into filesystem drivers: there's the basic user-or-kernel mode parameter, along with a flag to force the permissions check and another flag to skip the parameter validation...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: The Department of Energy disclosed details on Monday of one of the most expensive computers being built: a $500 million machine based on Intel and Cray technology that may become crucial in a high-stakes technology race between the United States and China (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source). The supercomputer, called Aurora, is a retooling of a development effort first announced in 2015 and is scheduled to be delivered to the Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago in 2021. Lab officials predict it will be the first American machine to reach a milestone called "exascale" performance, surpassing a quintillion calculations per second. That's roughly seven times the speed rating of the most powerful system built to date, or 1,000 times faster than the first "petascale" systems that began arriving in 2008. Backers hope the new machines will let researchers create significantly more accurate simulations of phenomena such as drug responses, climate changes, the inner workings of combustion engines and solar panels.

Aurora, which far exceeds the $200 million price for Summit, represents a record government contract for Intel and a test of its continued leadership in supercomputers. The Silicon Valley giant's popular processors -- the calculating engine for nearly all personal computers and server systems -- power most such machines. But additional accelerator chips are considered essential to reach the very highest speeds, and its rival Nvidia has built a sizable business adapting chips first used with video games for use in supercomputers. The version of Aurora announced in 2015 was based on an Intel accelerator chip that the company later discontinued. A revised plan to seek more ambitious performance targets was announced two years later. Features discussed on Monday include unreleased Intel accelerator chips, a version of its standard Xeon processor, new memory and communications technology and a design that packages chips on top of each other to save space and power.

When it comes to computer science skills, U.S. students approaching graduation have a significant advantage over their peers in China, India, and Russia. Tekla Perry shares a report: That's the conclusion of a study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. The study was put together by a global team of researchers led by Prashant Loyalka, an assistant professor at Stanford University. The team constructed a careful sampling mechanism to select senior (typically fourth year) computer science or equivalent students in each of the four countries, making sure that both the educational institutions and students enrolled at those schools were statistically representative of schools and computer science students throughout the respective nations. The sampling also ensured that study participants represented both elite and non-elite universities.

The final selection included 6847 students from the U.S., 678 from China, 364 from India, and 551 from Russia. Once the students were selected, the researchers then administered the Major Field Test in Computer Science, an exam that was developed by the U.S. Educational Testing Service and is regularly updated. The exam was translated for the students in China and Russia. When the researchers tabulated the results, the U.S. students came out ahead in every category. U.S. seniors outperformed their peers overall; students from elite U.S. schools outclassed their counterparts at the other countries' elite institutions; and the same was true for students at non-elite universities. (The differences among the scores of students in China, India, and Russia were not statistically significant, the researchers indicated.)

Reader samleecole writes: Recently I was looking around at the state of modern image editors and discovered something really disappointing. The issue? Well, even with the rise of modern Photoshop alternatives such as Affinity Photo and Pixelmator, these image editors are not designed to handle animated GIFs. Which means that, despite the fact that I'd certainly love to see what life is like outside of the world of Adobe, it looks like I'm stuck in that ecosystem for a little while longer. Don't get me wrong: Adobe's software is great, if a bit expensive. But I do think that its business model highlights just how consolidated its power actually is -- and it's not talked about nearly enough in the creative space.

[...] Adobe is too powerful and can ignore things it doesn't want to do -- whether in the form of cutting prices or ignoring usability concerns -- in part because it carries itself like it's the only game in town. Here's a case in point that matters a lot to me, actually: Apple has supported a native fullscreen mode in Mac OS since 10.7, better known as Lion. It's a fundamental feature, and helps keep windows well-sorted on laptops in particular. It works pretty well in every major Mac application -- except Adobe's. Worse, if you drag a picture from a web browser into Photoshop, the window moves and doesn't stay in the middle of the screen, creating a constant frustration that could be remedied if, again, Adobe bothered to support the native fullscreen mode that has come in Mac OS for the past seven and a half years.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The explosion of Amazon's private-label products -- batteries, baby wipes, jeans, tortilla chips, sofas -- has prompted concern that the world's biggest online retailer could use its clout to promote these house brands at the expense of merchants selling similar products on the web store. The issue even surfaced in Senator Elizabeth Warren's recent proposal to break up big technology companies. Turns out most Amazon-branded goods are flops that don't threaten other businesses at all, according to Marketplace Pulse. In a study, the New York e-commerce research firm examined 23,000 products and found that shoppers aren't more inclined to buy Amazon brands even when the company elevates them in search results. The study suggests popular political and media narratives about Amazon's market power are overblown, despite the company capturing 52.4 percent of all online spending in the U.S. this year, according to EMarketer.

The study used sales rankings and the number of customer reviews as indicators of sales volume for different products, including Amazon's own brands and brands sold exclusively on the site. Amazon's success has been limited to basic products like batteries where shoppers are inclined to seek generic alternatives to save money, the study found. But when competing against such categories as apparel, where household names have an entrenched position, such Amazon brands as "A for Awesome" children's wear don't stand out, the study found.

Ahead of a planned event next week, Apple today unveiled two new iPads. From a report: The new, larger, 10.5-inch iPad Air will arrive with a 70 percent performance boost compared to its predecessor, thanks to the company's A12 Bionic chip with Apple's Neural Engine. That'll be useful alongside the now 20-percent larger display -- which is compatible with the first-gen Apple Pencil too.

A new iPad Mini has been a long time coming. The 7.9-inch option will, barring screen size, match the Air on specs. The screen is also 25 percent brighter versus old iPad minis, and will also support Apple Pencil -- the tiniest model to do so. Both new iPads have a laminated display that brings the surface glass and screen closer together to improve visibility -- and making them at least a little more desirable than Apple's entry-level iPad. Neither has FaceID built-in, it seems. Look, there's that Home button. The new iPad mini starts at $399 for the Wi-Fi model and $529 for the variant that includes cellular support. The new iPad Air starts at $499 for Wi-Fi, and $629 for Wi-Fi and cellular model.

Business communications and collaboration service Slack said today that it is launching Enterprise Key Management (EKM) for Slack, a new tool that enables customers to control their encryption keys in the enterprise version of the communications app. The keys are managed in the AWS KMS key management tool. From a report: Geoff Belknap, chief security officer (CSO) at Slack, says that the new tool should appeal to customers in regulated industries, who might need tighter control over security. "Markets like financial services, health care and government are typically underserved in terms of which collaboration tools they can use, so we wanted to design an experience that catered to their particular security needs," Belknap told TechCrunch. Slack currently encrypts data in transit and at rest, but the new tool augments this by giving customers greater control over the encryption keys that Slack uses to encrypt messages and files being shared inside the app.

He said that regulated industries in particular have been requesting the ability to control their own encryption keys including the ability to revoke them if it was required for security reasons. "EKM is a key requirement for growing enterprise companies of all sizes, and was a requested feature from many of our Enterprise Grid customers. We wanted to give these customers full control over their encryption keys, and when or if they want to revoke them," he said. Further reading: Slack Doesn't Have End-to-End Encryption Because Your Boss Doesn't Want It.

Amazon is testing a new way to bolster its relationship with startups and possibly bring in more capital to the ecosystem. From a report: The fledgling effort, known as the Amazon Web Services Pro-Rata Program, is designed to link private investors with companies that use AWS, as well as venture funds whose portfolios are filled with potential cloud customers. Amazon is not investing money through the program.

The Pro-Rata program is being run by Brad Holden, a former partner at TomorrowVentures (founded by ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt), and Jason Hunt, who are both part of AWS's business development team focused on angel and seed relationships, according to an email they sent to investors in January. "The Pro-Rata Program is a new pilot intended to connect family offices and venture capitalists for specific investment opportunities from the AWS ecosystem," according to the email, which was viewed by CNBC. "Pro rata" refers to the rights investors have to put money in subsequent rounds. Mike Isaac, a reporter at The New York Times, writes, "If Amazon is using its direct knowledge of startups' health based on the fact that Amazon literally owns and operates the servers, how is this at all ethical? If that's not the case, Amazon should make that crystal clear (even though i'd have a hard time believing it). It's like Facebook's years of insights into [various] apps' data with the Onavo team, only instead of ripping companies off (which FB did), they invested in them."

MySpace may have lost your digital memories in a server migration. From a report: "As a result of a server migration project, any photos, videos, and audio files you uploaded more than three years ago may no longer be available on or from Myspace," it said in a note at the top of the site. "We apologize for the inconvenience. If you would like more information, please contact our Data Protection Officer at DPO@myspace.com."

Andy Baio, one of the people behind Kickstarter, tweeted that it could mean millions of songs uploaded between the site's Aug. 1, 2003 launch and 2015 are gone for good. "Myspace accidentally lost all the music uploaded from its first 12 years in a server migration, losing over 50 million songs from 14 million artists," he wrote Sunday. "I'm deeply skeptical this was an accident. Flagrant incompetence may be bad PR, but it still sounds better than 'we can't be bothered with the effort and cost of migrating and hosting 50 million old MP3s,'" Baio noted.

Google+ "was an Internet-based social network. It was almost 8 years old," reports KilledByGoogle.com, which bills itself as "The Google Graveyard: A list of dead products Google has killed and laid to rest in the Google Cemetery."

But before Google+ closes for good in April, its posts are being preserved by Internet Archive and the ArchiveTeam, reports the Verge: In a post on Reddit, the sites announced that they had begun their efforts to archive the posts using scripts to capture and back up the data in an effort to preserve it. The teams say that their efforts will only encompass posts that are currently available to the public: they won't be able to back up posts that are marked private or deleted... They also note that they won't be able to capture everything: comment threads have a limit of 500 comments, "but only presents a subset of these as static HTML. It's not clear that long discussion threads will be preserved." They also say that images and video won't be preserved at full resolution...

They also urge people who don't want their content to be archived to delete their accounts, and pointed to a procedure to request the removal of specific content.
A bit of history: Linus Torvalds launched a Google+ page in 2017 called "Gadget Reviews" -- where he made exactly six posts.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from public news station KNPR about how close weare flying taxi services: The dream of flying cars is as at least as old as the automobile itself. Bell, which makes attack helicopters for the U.S. Navy, is working on this new project with another high-profile partner, Uber. The prototype, the Bell Nexus, was unveiled earlier this year. Boeing and Airbus also have prototypes of these flying cars in the works. Uber has become the face of the aerial mobility movement as it has the most public campaign touting its work so far. Elon Musk says he'll get us to Mars. Uber says it'll get a millennial from San Francisco to San Jose in 15 minutes flat (instead of the two-hour slog in morning traffic). And its timeline for this flying taxi that does not yet exist is 2023...

NASA is another Uber partner. While Jaiwon Shin, NASA's associate administrator for the Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate, thinks Uber is being a little bullish -- he'd put the timeline further out, to the mid-2020s -- Shin says it's close. "Convergence of many different technologies are maturing to the level that now aviation can benefit to put these things together," he said. The batteries that power electric cars can evolve further, to power flight. Companies can stockpile and pool data, and build artificial intelligence to take over air traffic control, managing the thousands of drones and taxis in the air.

And Uber, his partner, is really well-connected. While fighting the legacy taxi industry, Uber made so many government and lobbyist contacts, that that Rolodex can help grease the wheels -- or wings.
"While no flying taxi exists yet, Uber has dared to estimate the 'near-term' cost of that San Francisco to San Jose trip: $43," the article reports -- suggesting that could create a new division in society.

"With flying cars, the haves can escape to the air and leave the have-nots forgotten in their potholes."

In Texas the local car dealer lobby has blocked Tesla from selling its cars directly to customers. They're using old laws meant to prevent car manufacturers from competing with their own local dealers -- but Tesla never had any local dealers!

And according to Electrek, it gets worse... Despite this issue, Texans have bought thousands of Tesla vehicles, which the automaker delivers from other states to comply with the law. Tesla has been able to service those vehicles through its own service centers, which are not subject to those same direct-sale rules, but now dealers are even going after Tesla's right to service its cars.
Quartz offers some additional coverage: At issue is a battle over money. Car dealers derive much of their revenue from selling and (especially) servicing vehicles. Tesla's direct-to-customer sales and service stations are a threat to that business model since they cut dealers out of the transaction.

The Huffington Post ran a bombshell report this week on one of a handful of people who have "figured out how to manipulate Wikipedia's supposedly neutral system to turn a profit." They're describing Ed Sussman, a former head of digital for Fast Company and Inc.com who's now paid to do damage control by relentlessly lobbying for changes to Wikipedia pages. "In just the past few years, companies including Axios, NBC, Nextdoor and Facebook's PR firm have all paid him to manipulate public perception using a tool most people would never think to check. And it almost always works." Spin reports: The benefit of hiring Sussman, aside from insulating talking heads from the humiliation of being found to have edited their own pages, is that he applies the exacting and annoying vigor of an attorney to Wikipedia's stringent editing rules. Further, because his opponents in these arguments are not opposing lawyers but instead Wikipedia's unpaid editors, he's really effective. From HuffPost:

"Sussman's main strategy for convincing editors to make the changes his clients want is to cite as many tangentially related rules as possible (he is, after all, a lawyer). When that doesn't work, though, his refusal to ever back down usually will. He often replies to nearly every single bit of pushback with walls of text arguing his case. Trying to get through even a fraction of it is exhausting, and because Wikipedia editors are unpaid, there's little motivation to continue dealing with Sussman's arguments. So he usually gets his way."

NBC and Axios confirmed that they hired Sussman, and an Axios spokesperson told HuffPost that the site "hired him to correct factual inaccuracies." The spokesperson added "pretty sure lots of people do this," which may or may not be true.
Sussman's web site argues he's addressing "inaccurate or misleading information...potentially creating severe business problems for its subject," bragging in his FAQ that when he's finished, "the article looks exactly the same" to an outsider -- and that his success rate is 100%.

Zorro (Slashdot reader #15,759), shares Reuters' report about Michael Sharpe, a medical researcher studying chronic fatigue syndrome, "a little-understood condition that can bring crushing tiredness and pain." Eight years after he published results of a clinical trial that found some patients with chronic fatigue syndrome can get a little better with the right talking and exercise therapies, the Oxford University professor is subjected to almost daily, often anonymous, intimidation... They object to his work, they said, because they think it suggests their illness is psychological. Sharpe, a professor of psychological medicine, says that isn't the case. He believes that chronic fatigue syndrome is a biological condition that can be perpetuated by social and psychological factors...

Sharpe is one of around a dozen researchers in this field worldwide who are on the receiving end of a campaign to discredit their work. For many scientists, it's a new normal: From climate change to vaccines, activism and science are fighting it out online. Social media platforms are supercharging the battle. Reuters contacted a dozen professors, doctors and researchers with experience of analysing or testing potential treatments for chronic fatigue syndrome. All said they had been the target of online harassment because activists objected to their findings. Only two had definite plans to continue researching treatments. With as many as 17 million people worldwide suffering this disabling illness, scientific research into possible therapies should be growing, these experts said, not dwindling. What concerns them most, they said, is that patients could lose out if treatment research stalls.
Sharpe says he's no longer researching treatments, because "It's just too toxic." And he tells Reuters that other researchers appear to be reaching the same conclusion.

"Of more than 20 leading research groups who were publishing treatment studies in high-quality journals 10 years ago, Sharpe said, only one or two continue to do so."

Medium's technology publication ran a 3,600-word investigation into a mystery that began when a 66-year-old New York woman Googled directions to her neighborhood, "and found that the app had changed the name of her community..." It's just as well no one contacted Google, because Google wasn't the company that renamed the Fruit Belt to Medical Park. When residents investigated, they found the misnomer repeated on several major apps and websites including HERE, Bing, Uber, Zillow, Grubhub, TripAdvisor, and Redfin... Monica Stephens, a geographer at the University at Buffalo who studies digital maps and misinformation, immediately suspected the geographic clearinghouse Pitney Bowes. Founded in 1920 as a maker of postage meters -- the machines that stamp mail with proof it's been sent -- Pitney Bowes expanded into neighborhood data in 2016 when it bought the leading U.S. provider, Maponics. In its 15-year run, Maponics had supplied neighborhood data to companies from Airbnb to Twitter to the Houston Chronicle. And it had also just acquired a longtime competitor, Urban Mapping, which has previously supplied Facebook, Microsoft, MapQuest, Yahoo, and Apple. Though Pitney Bowes is far from a household name, the $3.4 billion data broker is "a huge company at this point," says Stephens, with enough influence to inadvertently rename a neighborhood across hundreds of sites...

In the early 2000s, Urban Mapping offered new college grads $15 to $25 per hour to comb local blogs, home listings, city plans, and brochures for possible neighborhood names and locations. Maponics, meanwhile, used nascent technologies such as computer vision and natural language processing to pull neighborhoods from images and blocks of text, one former executive with the company said... I visited the Buffalo Central Library to find the source of the error... Sure enough, one of the librarians located a single planning office map that used the "Medical Park" label. It was a 1999 report on poverty and housing conditions -- long since relegated to a dusty shelf stacked with old binders and file folders... Somehow, likely in the early 2000s, this map made its way into what is now the Pitney Bowes data set -- and from there, was hoovered into Google Maps and out onto the wider internet. Buffalo published another map in 2017, with the Fruit Belt clearly marked, and broadcast on the city's open data portal. For whatever reason, Pitney Bowes and its customers never picked that map up.
This is not the first time Google Maps has seemed to spontaneously rename a neighborhood. But for Fruit Belt the reporter's query eventually prompted corrections to the maps on Redfin, TripAdvisor, Zillow, Grubhub, and Google Maps. But the article argues that when it comes to how city names are represented online, "the process is too opaque to scrutinize in public. And that ambiguity foments a sense of powerlessness."

Pitney Bowes doesn't even have a method for submitting corrections. Yet, "In an emailed statement, a spokesperson for Google defended its use of third-party neighborhood sources. 'Overall, this provides a comprehensive and up-to-date map,' the spokesperson said, 'but when we're made aware of errors, we work quickly to fix them.'"

What caused a devastating five-day blackout in Venezuela? Two engineers with expertise in geospatial technologies believe the answer lies in images from a NASA weather satellite showing thermal activity, which they superimposed onto Google Earth, the AP reports: Within hours of the attack, the government of embattled President Nicolas Maduro began accusing the U.S. of a cyberattack. Maduro has stuck to that narrative, saying hackers in the U.S. first shut down the Guri Dam and then delivered several "electromagnetic" blows. Engineers have questioned that assertion, contending that the Guri Dam's operating system is on a closed network with no internet connection.

Several consulted by The Associated Press speculated that a more likely cause was a fire along one of the electrical grid's powerful 765-kilovolt lines that connect the dam to much of Venezuela. The transmission lines traverse through some of Venezuela's most remote and difficult to access regions on their way toward Caracas, making it difficult to obtain any first-hand information that could back up or pinpoint the location of a fire. Working with an expert at Texas Tech University's Geospatial Technologies Laboratory, Jose Aguilar, an expert on Venezuela's electrical grid, said satellite data indicates that on the day of the blackout there were three fires in close proximity to the 765-kilovolt lines transmitting power generated from the Guri Dam, which provides about 80 percent of Venezuela's electricity...

Engineers have warned for years that Venezuela's state-run electricity corporation was failing to properly maintain power lines, letting brush that can catch fire during Venezuela's hot, dry months grow near and up the towering structures.

The Boring Company's tunnel project in Chicago is "in doubt" (according to the Chicago Tribune), while a project connecting Washington to Baltimore "is waylaid in the environmental-review process."

But it looks like Las Vegas will officially get a tunnel from Elon Musk, CNET reports, "perhaps within this year." The billionaire's Boring Company on Tuesday got the approval from the 14-member board of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) to build and operate an underground loop that would carry people in autonomous electric vehicles at the city's convention center.

Musk has responded to the approval in a tweet, saying he'll make the tunnel "operational by end of year," even though the convention center's expansion won't be done until 2021, according to LVCVA's release... A LVCVA spokeswoman said in an email that the underground loop will be ready in 2021 if the contract with the Boring company is approved at LVCVA's board meeting on June 11.
The Las Vegas Sun has more details, pointing out that travellers would be carried in electric vehicles moving through two parallel tunnels, one running in each direction. And that fleet of electric vehicles "could include Tesla's Model X and Model 3 and a vehicle with capacity for about 16 people â" all manufactured by Musk. All the vehicles would be fully autonomous, meaning they won't have backup drivers, and would move at speeds of up to 50 mph."

The mayor of Las Vegas, also a member of the board, actually voted against the tunnel, calling the Boring Company "exploratory at this time" and warning that "we are considering handing over the reins of our most important industry."